“A CURIOUS HUNGARIAN SUPERSTITION.
“A correspondent of the ‘Philadelphia Press,’ at Pottsville, Pa., tells of a curious scene he witnessed in the Hungarian quarter. A number of children were running round barefooted, beating tin pans and boxes. In the midst of the circle they were describing was a live baby buried up to the neck in the cold ground with a shawl wound round its throat for protection. It was learned that the object of putting the baby in this peculiar position was to cure it of a skin disease, the Huns having the same faith in the curative properties of mother earth that is characteristic of many savage tribes.
“While the child was thus experiencing the medicinal virtues of the earth packed round its body, the boys beat upon the pans in order to frighten away the evil spirit that had caused the disease.”
A retrospective glance at the long list of excrementitious remedies collected shows that both the disease to be treated and the remedy by which the cure was to be effected were regarded as entirely beyond the domain of human science. Even in these cases, where medicines, pure and simple, as we should now recognize them, were to be administered, there was a complication of mysterious mummery and ceremony, the first vestige of the former power of the medicine-man. Thus felons could be treated by tracing a circle round them with a dead man’s bone; but the circle, we should remember, was pre-eminently the line of magic.[95]
Teeth were worn as amulets, or given as medicine in disease, but it was essential that they should be drawn from the jaw before the burial of the body; or that they should be the first shed by a child; that they should be those of a man who had died a violent death; or that they should be caught before they touched the ground.
If they were not to be used immediately, they were not to be carried about, but were to be buried in the bark of a tree.
The skull of a man was a remedy for the diseases of men only; that of a woman, for those of the female sex.
There were combinations of numbers; no medicine was to be administered an even number of times; of color[96] based upon the doctrine of signatures which taught among other things, that red medicines cured red diseases, and saffron-tinted ones, those of the jaundice type. There were iron-clad formulæ for gathering medicinal plants in which the hour of the day, the season of the year, the age of the moon, the position of the planets, the hand to be used in plucking, the silence to be observed, were all sedulously inculcated and enjoined.
There were charms and counter-charms, such as the Dea-soil and the Badershin of the Druids, in which the same magical incantation, used in different manners, i. e. going with or against the sun, induced contrary results.
Traces of all these superstitious ideas are to be looked for in[97] close association with the administration of excrementitious remedial agents, or the incantations in which such agents appear.